Multivariate analysis of a simulated prognostics and health management system for military aircraft maintenance

Abstract

The Air Force logistics operations system is, in general, reactive in nature, with unscheduled aircraft maintenance beginning with a signal for out of tolerance conditions from the aircraft, subsequent fault isolation procedures performed by a maintenance team, and the steps taken to repair or replace the faulty item. The Joint Strike Fighter (JSF) programme has been pursuing an autonomic logistics system (ALS) concept that changes this reactive process into a proactive one, with the employment of technologies such as prognostics and a distributed information network. This paper briefly describes a simulation model of a prognostics and health management (PHM) system employed as part of an ALS for a JSF-type aircraft. The simulation produces a large number of commonly used flight line measures of performance for aircraft availability and mission effectiveness. Multivariate statistical analysis of these outputs provides a means to assess the impact of a PHM system on aircraft productivity.

Keywords:

• Simulation
• Military logistics
• Multivariate statistics
• Prognostics